Hi Nathan,
So it might help if you were to share more background about what prompted the questions...
Okay. Here's the background. My managers have asked me to take a look at Node on the IBM i. All of our web and mobile apps are currently written in .NET and access our IBM i using the .NET provider. So I know that I'm going to hear three questions from the .NET developers:
1. Why do we need Node? We can do everything we need to do with the .NET provider.
2. Why would we want to do things two different ways? Even if we adopt Node, we have far too much invested in .NET to get rid of it any time in the foreseeable future.
3. Why not just learn .NET? By the time you learn Node and everything else you need for a Node production environment, it would have been just as easy to learn .NET.
These are challenging questions. But I don't think they are the only questions to consider. One of the questions I want to raise is this: Where do we want to position our IBM i servers in a future of web and mobile development? Right now, we don't develop web apps or RESTful services that run on the IBM i, and we don't run any web servers on the IBM i. Do we want to leverage our IBM i servers to run web apps, RESTful services, and web servers? Or are our IBM i servers going to just be used as database servers at the very back end of our web and mobile apps?
And thus the motivation for my questions: If our IBM i servers *do* remain database servers at the very back end of our web and mobile apps developed with .NET, does it make sense to train our IBM i COBOL developers to be very proficient at data-centric development with DB2? If our IBM i servers are primarily database servers, then do we want to make data-centric development with DB2 a top priority on our IBM i servers? What would this actually mean? And would it have any implications for the .NET web and mobile apps that access our IBM i servers?
I'm hoping for the best (adopt Node) but planning for the worst (our IBM i servers are used only as database servers at the very back end of web and mobile apps).
Thanks,
Kelly Cookson
IT Project Leader
Dot Foods, Inc.
1.217.773.4486 ext. 12676
kcookson@xxxxxxxxxxxx
midrange.com
